British Telecommunications awarded a patent for block-chain security

One of the largest telecoms and internet service provider was awarded a patent proposed to provide cyber-security for the block-chains available.

This Patent was awarded to British Telecommunications PLC (BT) on 31st October. This patent to provide means for preventing malicious attacks on block-chains by limiting transactions of users in the network who doesn’t fit the security requirements. The new code in block-chain will automatically filter out bad transactions and reject them on the basis that they don’t match pre-described accounts.

One use case that was highlighted by the patent was total control of block-chain which can be done if the attacker has more than 50% of the computing power that is required by a blockchain network to run.

The patent states: “Despite the architecture of blockchain systems, malicious attacks present a threat to the security and reliability of blockchains.”

When an attack is detected the system will automatically put a halt to the transactions, preventing a major attack to build up and from it being effective. The patent also includes clauses for distributed denial of service attacks which are designed to exhaust a miner with large number of transaction requests. The British Telecommunication doesn’t tell how it would deal with such DDOS attacks but it does state that a mechanism to detect and deal with such attacks would vastly improve the security of block-chain environments.